By Susan Ferrechio (The Washington Times)
A startup nuclear power company this week became the first in the nation to apply to connect its next-generation reactors to the electrical grid.
Maryland-based Blue Energy plans to build up to five small modular reactors in Victoria, Texas, that will supply as much as 1.5 gigawatts of energy for a 1,600-acre data center complex.
The company submitted an application to connect to the grid operated by Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the state’s power supply.
Blue Energy is one of several companies seeking to build next-generation nuclear reactors to power the nation’s energy grid and an onslaught of new data centers.
The Washington Times has reached out to the company and to ERCOT.
Nearly a half-dozen nuclear energy companies have applied to the federal government for construction permits.
Small modular reactors have been in development for years but have yet to be deployed in the United States and none will be operational here for several more years at the earliest.
A handful of SMR plants are running in Russia and China and one is poised to begin operating in Canada within the next decade.
The Trump administration prioritized nuclear energy development and has sped up the permitting process for new reactors.
The new technology is poised to start producing new nuclear power in the United States by early in the next decade.
X-Energy’s SMR project with Dow in Seadrift, Texas, is among the other projects. It completed its environmental review with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in May for four 80-megawatt units that the company hopes will be providing power and steam to Dow’s industrial facility by the 2030s.
SMR plants are smaller than traditional water-cooled nuclear power plants and can be built faster and cheaper.
They use a variety of coolants, so they do not need to be positioned near large water sources. They produce about one-third of the energy of a traditional nuclear reactor.
Blue Energy plans to build SMRs using prefabricated materials that will then be assembled on site. Company officials say their building method will cut the time it takes to get the SMR’s up and operating by more than a decade and will significantly cut costs in comparison to traditional nuclear power plants.
The Texas project will deploy the GE Vernova Hitachi BWRX-300 SMRs along with GE gas turbines in a first-of-its-kind gas-to-nuclear power plant. The gas-powered plants are slated to go online first, accelerating the project’s ability to power the data center.
About 18% of U.S. electricity is generated by nuclear power, about half of all carbon-free electricity produced in America.
The Trump administration is providing federal funding to help extend the life of the nation’s existing nuclear reactors, most of which are decades old.
On Monday, the Energy Department announced it would loan up to $4.2 billion to modernize nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania and Ohio. The money will extend the life of the plants by an additional 20 years, according to Vistra, which operates the reactors.
The last new commercial nuclear reactors built in the United States began operating in 2023 and 2024 in southeastern Georgia. Only one other new nuclear reactor has come online since 1996.
This article was made available to WMAL via The Washington Times.
